Saturday, September 20, 2008

The Service Pack 1 for Visual Web Developer 200 Express was released sometime back by Microsoft. I upgraded my VWD 2008 to SP1. This now allows me to have multiple projects within the same solution. This feature was not present in any of the express editions and is a welcome addition.

Earlier if you wanted to build separate class library projects for Data Access and Business Logic, you could not do so in Express editions. What one had to do was to create different sub-folders within the App-Code directory and code the classes in these sub-folders. The problem with this was that if your application was big then compiling the whole thing took a lot of time. With different projects you can easily separate your classes which allows for fast compiling and easy debugging.

With SP1, the Entity Data Framework has also been added. I had seen a video on Entity Framework at asp.net and this was something which I would love to explore.

There must be other feature enhancements, which I haven't looked at right now. But if you haven't upgraded to SP1, I suggest you do so!

Monday, September 15, 2008

After the Delhi blasts, I was discussing with my friends that what could be done by the people to fight terrorism. During this discussion, All India Anti Terrorist Front was mentioned. I remember the organization had its office near Mandir Marg, New Delhi because it used to be on the way to my uncle's house. I was wondering what was this organization doing in the wake of recent terror attacks. So I googled to find their website. And guess what I found?

The site is marked as harmful by Google. When you click on the link of the site you get the following warning.

I wanted to be surprised, but given the hi-tech nature of the terrorists, I was not. This organization seems to be defunct and dead. Do any of you know of any similar organization? What can we do to fight terrorism?

Saturday, September 13, 2008

In one of my recent projects, an aspx page had to have a graph which would indicate the performance of the system being monitored. This had to be developed quickly, so I was looking for a free graph control which I could use. And I came across ZedGraph, the open source graph control developed for .NET. There were other alternatives as well, but the good thing about Zedgraph was the documentation and examples given. With these I was able to develop what seemed like the most complicated piece of software in a matter of hours.

Zedgraph is a really flexible graphing control with lot of options. You can have line graphs, bar graphs, or any other type of graph that you may think of, multiple Y axes, multiple curves, different types of X axes from time based scaling to logarithmic scaling. For a free control it really provides a lot of features that will fulfill all your essential requirements.

So, if you are searching for a Free Graph control, I suggest you give Zedgraph a try.